A year living outside
Escaping the domestic wilderness
I left home on the 15th of August, 2015 — clumsily symbolic because I’m poor at metaphors. For most people, this act of leaving occurs earlier in life; when they’re sent to boarding school for discipline;or college to engage with adulthood; but as a spoilt idiot child, I stayed home.
When I left, it wasn’t entirely clear whether it made sense — you’re interminably reminded that you should genuflect at the altar of compound interest and save the money that thwarts certain doom. Yet, I forged ahead with the understanding that while the question was ambiguous in its numerical value (trust me, I ran a spreadsheet), I didn’t want to be a 30 year old man child who was bedeviled by laundry every week.
Life at home can be regimented thanks to the operating strictures of foisted by parents. What you do and how you make decisions are circumscribed by the concerns of the familial lifestyle, even though it doesn’t seem this way. This is why so many people have a terrible time living with parents once they move back in after college, or visiting for a duration long enough for vastly different visions of life to clash out in the open.
And this is a part of why people leave, and should.
Because in a globalized culture where containers of meaning— issues, norms, art, interfaces — transition in value on vastly shorter timelines, generations of culture shrivel up and disparities abound . This why people addicted to Facebook can’t make sense of Snapchat.
Thus, in periods of vast change, building new lifestyles becomes imperative, and I think you can only really do that once you leave and start afresh.
In more moralising terms, you might think of it as taking responsibility for your own life, but getting past the self-affirming message of this stance, you reach more pedestrian questions of operational effectiveness.
Take how we try to eat cleanly. Inevitably, we fail, order greasy takeout, feel bad, run an extra kilometer in wistful apology, relent on our resolutions, and resort to blindly trying harder — while being shadowed by a learning amnesia that’d be embarrassing if someone were taking notes. This mode of failure underwrites the simplifying logic of Soylent, Crossfit, writing prompts etc.
Drake said know yourself. I’m sure someone else said it before, and better, but I like Drake’s version best.
Leaving home can be a powerful impetus in discovering the limits of our lifestyles, and that knowledge lends the powerful ability to repurpose our commitments. It can mean a positive retrenchment of time, effort, money, and the self-worth we derive from the small achievements. It’s the flywheel that gets our future started.
And we’re pretty bad at it.
In my case, I thought I was fully cognizant of the work before me. I’d never done my own laundry, had to think about food — much less groceries and prep — or quotidian items like rent payments, utilities, taxes, showers. If one looked past the continual friction of exercising lifestyle agency, it was a pretty sweet deal. It was essential infrastructure powering the operating system of my life, and I never had to think about it, except when hitting against some unspoken norm or expectation — sleeping times, staying out late, or a fastidious commitment to Indian food for all meals.
But living alone is not easy. It’s not hard in the way say committing to a diet is hard, but there’s a daily cognitive overhead that simmers in the background demanding continual maintenance; your lifestyle’s refuge against entropy. In my case, it meant so many minor errands whose accumulation was a lifestyle fatigue that made me want to do away with serious commitments anything; diet, exercise, household chores, even TV.
Rather than the result of some grand romantic overture, I thought maybe this is why people move in together, get married, and stay together, because who wants to deal with this shit alone? The essential loneliness of chores engendering lifelong partners to crusade against tedium.
But it’s not just time or effort. It’s the secondary consequences of choosing to spend money one way or another.
I used to be a huge gamer in high school, and some part of college. While the most ambitious among us toiled away at consuming edifying tomes, I frittered away large chunks of my day running around in Mass Effect chasing rare armour, or grinding to improve my xp to get to the next level in Elder Scrolls. I was dimly aware that much of this was serial human manipulation that had acquired the euphemism “gamification”, but the idea of opportunity cost — that I could be doing something better — never struck me as important; in my precocious wisdom, the days were long, and time stretched forever onward.
It was only at 24, when time seemed like it was clocking out faster and faster, that I thought I should be more parsimonious with my resources (time, money, energy) whose commitment brings large unwritten claims on life.
But I still bought a Playstation 4. “This is objectively not a great idea”, I remember. Unlikely college where I become a master on the oeuvre of the Coen Brothers, and saw the Wire 5 times, I barely watch tv or movies now. They don’t interest me, and I can’t keep up the pace at which our cultures produces media. But I still convinced myself I needed a Playstation. And therefore I needed a television.
Suddenly, the basic desire to have freedom to choose my avenues of entertainment meant a descent into the lavish lifestyle addiction of video games on the expensive infrastructure I’d just invested in. Oh sure, I told myself I could watch movies and TV, too. This was sunk cost 101. Thankfully, I admitted I was deceiving myself early, and I’ve decided to get rid of this stuff (hit me up if you need a voracious time sink/entertainment device).
Technology in the 21st century is a marvellous thing.
The proliferation of things to do, see, consume, along with the tools to create make it a tremendously exciting time if you can get things right.
But instead, a large of the experience seems muddled in anomie, and exhaustion. You can rightly ascribe it to the transitional phase we find ourselves in; between the old economy and the new (as Venkatesh Rao chronicles over at Breaking Smart).
But some of it is just the fact that we still haven’t figured out an architecture to make choices well. And making bad choices, choosing actions that don’t conform to the things we deeply want to achievement (Joe Edelman eloquently thinks about in this talk, “Is anything worth maximising?”), is a demotivating force that unravels our sense of worth.
Most of our mental models for this stuff are geared for the old world of scarcity, while we’re hurtling towards an abundance-driven future. All the while, the tools of designing, measuring, and implementing human experience — things that require us to choose — have progressively gotten more sophisticated at getting us to do stuff. Yet, we’re flailing about not improving very much in our powers to decide.
Fixing all of this required a motivated search for mental models and behavioral change. Thanks to the internet, there’s already a large compendium of help from people who’ve navigated the same problem; also thanks to the internet, they’re buried beneath landfill of GIFs, angry tweets, and porn. If you’re rich, you can outsourcing these duties to expensive services that do it everything for you ( from personal trainers, on-demand healthy kitchens, to home services). Such an act of volition means its own set of invisible limitations, but it’s restoration of control.
In my case, I’ve done a fairly terrible job of this in the last year. In the one year of being out, I can say that the cognitive friction of my lifestyle has been normalised, but may other goals lie untouched, or poorly implemented.
I’ve finally begun to write more, and exercise regularly. Next is eat heath food more regularly, and pick up some new skills (hip hop beat-making, IDK). Honestly, if your habits have been as terrible as mine have for decades, change is overwhelming, and the desire to capitulate gnaws at you incessantly as you watch everyone around you breezily doing their thing.
But I finally ran 6 kms for the first time in my life today.
Onwards. Upwards.
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